[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
[October 27, 1996]
[Pages 1945-1952]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee
October 27, 1996

    Thank you very much. Thank you. I am delighted to be here at the 
reunion of the Vice President's family, friends, and medical support 
team. [Laughter] I would like to keep this crowd with us for the next 
several days. [Laughter]
    I'm delighted to be back at Vanderbilt. Chancellor Wyatt, Vice 
Chancellor Robinson, thank you very much for making us feel so welcome 
here. Congressman Clement, thank you for coming with us. I'd also like 
to acknowledge our good friend Justin Dart, who leads our national 
effort to mobilize people with disabilities. Thank you, Justin. Thank 
you for being here.
    Noah Liff, thank you for your example and for your fine words and 
for your support of welfare reform. And I thank the other business 
leaders who are here as well.
    Governor McWherter, thank you for being my friend and my colleague 
over all these years. You know, you Tennesseans can say that he was the 
best Governor Tennessee ever had. I don't know that because I never 
lived here. But I can tell you this: He's the best politician I ever 
met. The first time I ever met him, he put that ``aw, shucks'' deal on 
me that he does, you know. I wanted to reach in my pocket and make sure 
the billfold was still there. [Laughter] And if he'd wanted it, I would 
have given it to him. [Laughter]
    I think it's fair to say that those of us who served as Governors 
with Ned McWherter thought at the time there was no State that was 
better run, no State more oriented toward the proper balance of 
continuous change and

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sensible management and old-fashioned common sense and good values. And 
I'm honored by his friendship and his support, and I'm delighted he's 
here with us today.
    I want to say a special word of thanks, as we move to the end of 
this election season, to the Vice President. I was watching him on the 
debate the other night and thinking that I knew exactly what he was 
going to say before he said it. And we've spent so much time together 
now, it's almost like we can begin to speak in code, you know--two or 
three words and I can finish the sentence, and vice-versa. I think there 
has never been a relationship quite like this in American history 
between a President and a Vice President. But I must tell you, it's been 
one of the most richly rewarding things of my life, and I think it's 
been very, very good for the American people.
    His leadership is the principal reason that we have been able to 
reduce the Government to its smallest size since the Kennedy 
administration, eliminate more regulations and Government programs, and 
privatize more operations than the previous two administrations 
combined. And no one has noticed a decline in Government services. In 
fact, our Federal employees are doing more with less and doing it better 
than ever before, thanks to the Vice President's leadership in 
reinventing Government. He was responsible for many of the most 
important provisions of the landmark telecommunications bill. He's 
helped us devise a budget that would continue to increase our investment 
in research and technology, even while we cut overall spending to 
balance the budget. He has made a major contribution to our efforts to 
finish the unfinished business of the cold war, especially in his work 
in Russia. There has never been a Vice President with more 
responsibility, who has achieved more, and who has done more to advance 
the cause of America than your native son Al Gore.
    As all of you know, 10 days from now the American people will go to 
the polls to choose the last President of the 20th century and the first 
President of the 21st century. Tonight and over the next several days, I 
will ask the American people not just to come to rallies and cheer, 
although we all need that, especially in the last days of a long, hard 
effort, but to think again about how we are going to meet the challenges 
of the 21st century, how we are going to seize the opportunities of the 
21st century, how we are going to preserve our values and the things we 
hold dear in the next century, how we can make it the age of greatest 
possibility in human history. Our central goal must be to work together 
to give our people the tools they need to master the changes that are 
taking place.
    In the next week I'm going to talk about four of the biggest 
challenges we face: How we finish the job of balancing the budget while 
preserving our values; giving our children a world-class education; 
opening the doors of college to all Americans; and making at least 2 
years of education after high school as universal by the dawn of the 
21st century as a high school diploma is today. And I want to talk about 
making our families stronger by helping all Americans to succeed both at 
home and at work, in safety and security. And tonight I want to talk 
about ending the cycle of welfare dependency, family breakdown, and 
crime by carrying on our historic efforts to reform welfare.
    I first came to Vanderbilt to give a speech nearly a decade ago now, 
when I was invited to come here and talk about what it was like to be a 
Governor in a time of change in the global economy. I remember it very 
well. I expect I'm the only person in this audience who remembers it 
very well--[laughter]--but nonetheless, I do. It was about that time 
that I was asked to represent the Democratic Governors, along with my 
colleague, the Governor of Delaware--the Republican Governor of 
Delaware--and working with Congress and the Reagan administration to try 
to help reform the welfare system.
    Those efforts produced the Family Support Act of 1988, which itself 
was a substantial improvement over the previous law, and which gave the 
President very, very broad powers, which before I took office were 
rarely used, to work with States and communities to change the rules of 
welfare, to try to develop a system that would move people from 
dependence to independence.
    Four years ago when Al Gore and I came to Nashville, I said I wanted 
an America in which every person responsible enough to work for it has a 
shot at the American dream, an America still the world's strongest force 
for peace and freedom, an America coming together and relishing its 
diversity through its shared values.
    We have pursued a simple but profound strategy. We have worked to 
expand opportunity for

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all, to demand responsibility from all, and to build a stronger American 
community, to make that America's basic bargain. Four years ago, the 
Vice President and I asked you to take us on faith. Tonight, you can 
look at a record.
    Our Nation is clearly moving in the right direction. We have 10\1/2\ 
million new jobs, over 270,000 of them here in Tennessee. Unemployment 
here has dropped by about a third, to 4.1 percent. We have the lowest 
combined rates of unemployment, inflation in home mortgages in 20 
years--28 years. After inflation, household income is up about $1,600 in 
the last 2 years. There are 4\1/2\ million new homeowners. The 
inequality among working people just declined by the largest amount in 
27 years. Childhood poverty dropped the most it has in 20 years. The 
incomes and poverty of households headed by women had its most dramatic 
drop in 30 years. And we just recorded the lowest poverty rates ever 
recorded for African-Americans and all our senior citizens. We have 4\1/
2\ million new homeowners, record numbers of new small businesses, 
record exports. We are moving in the right direction.
    We are pushing back the frontiers of knowledge in ways that will 
benefit all of us. Here at the medical center, in science labs, biotech 
firms, and universities all across our Nation, in millions of homes in 
the everyday miracle of the Internet, we see the leaps of science, 
technology that are no less dazzling for being so widespread.
    Just today before I came here, I met with a lot of people who work 
with the problems of cancer. I met with cancer survivors; I met with 
physicians; I met with researchers; I met with people in support groups. 
Among other things, I announced that we will be dedicating 30 million 
more dollars this year to genetic breast cancer research, because--and 
this is just one example--we have identified two of the genes in the 
human structure that cause breast cancer. And when you put that with the 
fact that we are now using the very sophisticated imaging technology we 
use in our satellites for defense and intelligence purposes on the human 
body, so we can detect, prevent, or stop early the spread of all kinds 
of diseases, we are literally on the verge of breakthroughs we never 
could have dreamed of just a couple of years ago.
    Not very long ago, we had movement for the first time ever in a 
laboratory animal whose spine has been completely severed; the animal 
had movement in its lower limbs when there were nerve transplants from 
other parts of the body to the spine. We've developed the first 
treatment for stroke ever in the last 4 years. The average life 
expectancy of people with HIV has more than doubled in the last 4 years 
with research and more rapid movement of drugs to market. It will soon, 
I believe, become a manageable chronic disease, not a certain death 
warrant. All these things have happened in the last 4 years.
    But we have much to do, and we have to choose a decision about how 
we're going to walk into the future. And one of the major decisions 
before the American people in this election--and not just the race for 
President but many others as well--is what are those things which we 
should do together? To what extent do we believe we're better off on our 
own? To what extent do we believe, yes, it does take a village to raise 
our children and build our future? To what extent do we think we can 
find our way on our own into the 21st century? To what extent do we need 
to build a bridge that's clearly marked and big and wide and strong 
enough for us all to go over together?
    We have tried to define what we think we should do together and what 
we think the Nation's responsibilities are. We've cut the deficit by 60 
percent. Now we can finish the job of balancing the budget and do it in 
a way that reflects our values, that preserves the fundamental structure 
of Medicaid and Medicare, education and the environment, research and 
technology.
    We have cut taxes for 15 million working families. And because our 
economy is on the right track, we can balance the budget with a targeted 
tax cut for families where they need it the most, for education, 
childrearing, medical care, and buying that first home.
    We've improved our educational standards, expanded college 
scholarships and loans. Now we have to reform education at every level, 
raising standards, increasing accountability, making sure that every 8-
year-old can read independently, every 12-year-old can log into the 
Internet in every classroom and library in America, every 18-year-old 
can go on to college.
    We're making our families and neighborhoods safer. We're in the 
process of putting 100,000 more police on our streets, getting gangs and 
guns and drugs off the streets. Now we have

[[Page 1948]]

to finish the job of putting those police on the street and crack down 
on teen gangs with the same focus and the same law we are using to break 
organized crime.
    We now have the lowest crime rate in 10 years--4 years of declining 
crime rates. But all of you know there is still a long way to go before 
the American people really feel safe and secure again. Now is not the 
time to back up; now is the time to bear down with an approach that is 
working.
    We've helped to strengthen our families with the family leave law; 
12 million times families have taken a little time off from work when a 
baby was born or a family member was sick, without losing their jobs. 
And I think America is stronger because of it. I thank the Vice 
President and Tipper for the work they did to advocate that here in 
Nashville at the family conference.
    Now it's time to expand family leave, I believe, so that parents can 
take a little time off to go see their children's teachers twice a year 
or to make regular doctor appointments for their kids. And because 
people are working harder than ever and so many people have trouble 
juggling the demands of parenting and work, I think we ought to give 
workers the option of using overtime they accumulate and taking it 
either in cash or in more time with their families at their own 
discretion. That will help us to be a stronger country.
    But we also have to finish the job of welfare reform. For many 
reasons, most of which have already been explained by previous speakers 
and especially the Vice President, our welfare system has failed a lot 
of people. To be frank, a lot of people--it worked as well as anything 
would because they were just in a temporary difficult position. They got 
on welfare; then they got off again and went on with their lives. But 
year-in and year-out, especially as more and more children were born 
into single-parent homes, more and more people became trapped in a 
permanent cycle of welfare dependency in ways that literally physically 
isolated generations of people away from communities with mainstream 
values, mainstream opportunities, and mainstream futures, exiling people 
from the world of work that gives structure, meaning, and dignity to the 
lives of the rest of us.
    The system--for those people for whom it did not work, the system 
hurt them a lot more than it did the other taxpayers who often 
complained about it loudly and publicly. Children who are born to a life 
on welfare, we know from study after study, are more likely to drop out 
of school, fall afoul of the law, become teen mothers or teen fathers, 
raise their own children on welfare.
    For too long, welfare has been the object of partisan debate rather 
than collective common effort. Too many people in politics, especially 
the further you get away from the people on welfare, if you get all the 
way back to Washington, DC, ask who is to blame instead of what to do. 
For too long, a lot of other Americans assumed there was nothing that 
could be done about it; you simply could not make it any better than it 
was. Welfare, teen pregnancy, crime all seemed destined to go on and 
grow forever.
    That's why Al Gore and I pledged to end welfare as we know it 4 
years ago. We did not believe that these problems would not yield to 
sensible, persistent human effort. As a Governor, for 16 years--12 years 
as Governor, now 4 years as President--I have worked on welfare reform 
and worked personally face-to-face with people on welfare. I knew 
better. I knew how bad those people wanted a different deal and a 
better, brighter future. I knew from the beginning we could change this 
system for the better.
    The old system, yes, it wasted taxpayers' money, but even more 
tragically, it trapped millions into a lifetime of dependency. Well, 
that system is now over, but the question is, what are we going to do 
now?
    We have shown that we can restore our communities and renew our 
values, but the job is not done. As the Vice President said, we gave 
special permission to 43 States to get out from under a whole variety of 
Federal rules, to redesign systems that would help move people from 
welfare to work more rapidly. This has made a real difference. We also 
had some rules, including requiring teen mothers to live at home and 
stay in school, or lose their welfare benefits.
    We also recognize that governments can't raise children, parents do 
that. One of the main reasons people go on welfare in the first place is 
that parents run away from their responsibility to support their own 
children. Do you know, tonight, if every parent who is legally obligated 
to do so paid all the child support they had been legally found able to 
pay, 800,000 people would be off the welfare rolls tomorrow? That's why 
we stiffened Federal child support enforce-


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ment, worked with the States more closely than ever, and why I signed an 
order directing Federal employees to pay their child support or have it 
paid for them. I wanted us to set an example.
    We required hospitals to have programs to identify the father at the 
time of birth, insisted that welfare recipients name the father or lose 
benefits. We posted deadbeat parents in post offices, on the Internet; 
we're going to deny them Federal loans. We used the IRS to collect a 
record $1 billion in child support, worked with States on a new computer 
system to identify those who switched jobs or moved from their home 
State to avoid paying child support.
    I might say that 35 percent of all delinquent child support cases 
involve people who have crossed State lines. In the first few months of 
this new system, we identified 60,000 deadbeat parents who now must pay.
    All of these efforts are bearing fruit. The welfare rolls are down 
by nearly 2 million in the last 4 years. Tennessee has 75,000 fewer 
recipients, a 25 percent drop. Just this week new statistics were 
published showing that all across America child support collections have 
increased by 50 percent in the last 4 years, up in every single State in 
America. That's $4 billion a year more going to children and parents who 
otherwise would have to fend for themselves and depend more on the 
taxpayers to support them.
    Another thing you can be proud of in Tennessee is that Tennessee is 
one of the top five States in the country over the last 4 years--here, 
child support collections have doubled. They're up 100 percent in the 
last 4 years.
    And believe it or not, while too many young people are still having 
babies outside marriage, even on that front America is making progress. 
Teen births have gone down for 4 years in a row. And last year the out-
of-wedlock birth rate declined for the first time in nearly 20 years.
    That brings us to where we are now, a people determined to get back 
to our basic values, even as we modernize our economy and face the 
future. This welfare reform law gives us an historic chance, but not a 
guarantee, to restore the basic values of work, responsibility, and 
families and to end the literal exile of millions of poor people from 
the mainstream of American life and all of its promise. The new law 
imposes strict time limits on welfare. It requires those who can work to 
go to work. It mounts the strictest crackdown ever on child support 
collections. But it also says we will continue to provide as a national 
guarantee health care and nutrition for poor families and, when the 
welfare recipient goes to work, more for child care than ever before, so 
that families will get the help they need when they move from welfare to 
work. The new law gives us a change to make welfare what it was intended 
to be, a second chance, not a way of life.
    But let me say again, we say from now on people who can work have to 
go to work; no one who can work can stay on welfare forever. We're 
making work, family, and responsibility a way of life. We are not going 
back. Our welfare legislation, however, is just the beginning. That is 
the important thing that every single American citizen has to 
understand. Maybe it's because I was a Governor before I became a 
President, but I know that there's a lot of difference between passing a 
law and changing lives in the neighborhoods and streets of every 
community in the United States. You have to help us change those lives. 
You have to help us implement this welfare reform law and make it work 
the way it was supposed to.
    We're not going to walk away from these children. We're not going to 
walk away from these families. We're going to take them by the hand and 
walk with them into a bright new future. And you're going to help. 
[Applause] Thank you. Thank you.
    Let's look at where you are in Tennessee right now. You've heard 
this talked about before tonight, but I want to say again, there are 
12,000 Tennessee families who have signed new personal responsibility 
contracts. Now, they've promised to be personally responsible. And the 
people of Tennessee, through their elected officials and those who work 
for the State, have promised to keep up their end of the bargain to give 
those people a chance to act on their responsibility, like these fine 
folks who stood up over here and whom we clapped for tonight. So as we 
require people to take responsibility and go to work, we have to make 
sure they have the opportunity to work.
    One of the reasons that I wanted to sign this law so badly, 
maintaining the guarantees of health care and nutrition and child care 
but giving the welfare money back to the States and ultimately to the 
local communities, was so we could take poverty out of politics and 
substitute reality for that old rhetoric. Now, everybody who has ever 
said a bad word about

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the welfare system has nothing left to cuss; there is nothing there 
anymore. [Laughter] And now, there is no politics in poverty any more; 
there are only people. And they are our people. They are our children. 
They are our future.
    This law says to them, ``We're not going to keep you on modified 
life support forever anymore. It's a lousy deal for you and a bad deal 
for us.'' But here's where you come in. This is not the New Deal in the 
Great Depression anymore, either. The Government has to balance the 
budget to keep interest rates down, to keep the economy strong, so we 
can keep creating jobs for everybody. We cannot have a Government-
created program that hires all these folks. You're going to have to do 
that.
    Sure, there will be some hired into public jobs, and in areas of 
densely high unemployment we're going to give extra help in the early 
years to make sure that people have a chance, but by and large, over the 
Nation, people will have to be hired by employers in the private sector, 
in the nonprofit sector, churches, and great universities like 
Vanderbilt, both public and private.
    But that is better--it is better that people be hired, 10 or 15 or 
maybe even 1 or 2 at a time, and given a chance to just be integrated 
into the normal flow of American life, rather than being hired 1,000 at 
a time to do one thing off here to the side. We want everybody to walk 
together into the future. But to do it--to do it--we have to have an 
upsurge of personal responsibility from the private sector.
    Now, as I said, under the new law States can take this money the 
Federal Government used to give for the monthly welfare check, and they 
can use it to help businesses provide paychecks. Seven hundred people 
have gone to work in Kansas City at the Full Employment Council that I 
visited in that system. That's a good deal for businesses; they can 
create more jobs for less money. And it's a good deal for taxpayers; 
they save money every time someone leaves welfare to work. It's a good 
deal for the people on welfare; they get a job.
    The National Government has tried to make work pay. We've raised the 
minimum wage. We dramatically expanded the earned-income tax credit. We 
have made--clearly made now work a better deal than welfare. That tax 
credit alone is worth about $10 billion this year, and it's reducing the 
poverty rate among working people dramatically. It only goes to people 
who are working. And it is reducing the poverty rate dramatically by 
saying we're not going to tax people into poverty anymore.
    The Vice President has helped us to create a national network of 
community development banks, 105 empowerment zones and enterprise 
communities to get more private capital into the areas where there are 
large numbers of unemployed people, including many who are unemployed 
who are not on welfare--a lot of single men, for example.
    I have proposed a plan now that will create another million jobs. 
Number one, we want to give business a new tax credit for every person 
hired off welfare. Number two, we want to give the same private job 
placement firms that Americans use to get better jobs for themselves 
when they're already working--we want to give those firms a bonus for 
helping people on welfare find their first job. And we want to help 
States and communities give businesses more incentives to hire welfare 
recipients.
    These are the things that we can do. We can also give greater 
investments into those areas, as I said, where there are a whole lot of 
people who are unemployed, including large welfare populations, because 
we may not be able to get enough private sector jobs in the short run.
    But in the end--we can do all this, we can do every bit of it, but 
if we don't have more people like Noah Liff, we're not going to make it. 
If we don't have more people like the nearly 50 business leaders who 
have already agreed to participate here in Tennessee, we're not going to 
make it.
    So I ask you, every one of you, just think what would happen if 
every business, every nonprofit, every university, every school, and 
every church, synagogue, and religious institution in this country took 
what used to go to the welfare recipient in the welfare check as a 
supplement and hired just one person--just one person--and took 
responsibility for training that person, making sure their kids were 
okay and going forward. Just think about it. Think what we could do. We 
can revolutionize this. This would be over. Just one person.
    I should emphasize--Governor McWherter reminded me, you know, he 
plays like he's not interested in policy, but he's a policy wonk in his 
rural clothing. [Laughter] He said, ``Now, when you get up there 
tonight, Mr. President, don't forget to tell them that in Tennessee we 
also guarantee that if these people have to go

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to work in a place that doesn't have health insurance, we set it up so 
they can keep their health insurance under Medicaid for a good while. 
And then after a certain amount of time, under TennCare, they can buy in 
at a rate they can afford to keep their health insurance even more.'' 
That's also important. You're doing that.
    It's amazing to me, the excitement here. The Governor of North 
Carolina told me he was in Charlotte the other day talking to 4,000 
people at the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce, and he said before he got 
out the door, 25 percent of them had volunteered to help.
    The other day in Missouri, the CEO of Monsanto asked all his 
division heads to study every aspect of their company to see what they 
could do to hire as many people off welfare as possible in Monsanto, and 
to--I hesitate to use the word, but ``lean on'' their suppliers and 
other business contacts to ask them to do the same thing.
    The CEO of Sprint pledged to provide an 800 number that any employer 
in America can call to find out how to move people off welfare. A few 
weeks ago in Connecticut, hundreds of business leaders pledged that 
their companies would help us to meet this challenge. Last week in 
Louisiana, the CEO of Northrop Grumman, a company that makes a lot of 
products important to our national defense, did the same.
    But this Tennessee Business Partnership is especially impressive. 
From Fortune 500 companies to Opryland, to companies like the recycling 
business that Noah described, it represents your whole business 
community. Just remember what I said: If every company would just hire 
one person, and not just companies but nonprofits and universities and 
religious institutions, we would whip this thing. And if every State 
will form a partnership like the Tennessee Business Partnership, we will 
work with them to get this job done.
    I want to say again: We passed a law; that's a good thing. The law 
didn't change anybody's lives. And if we don't change the lives, 
benefits will someday be cut off, but we won't be creating jobs and 
building new futures for those people and their children. That's the 
important thing.
    The other day I was in Florida, where I met with four very 
impressive women who were working themselves off welfare. And it was 
phenomenal to me--I asked them all, ``Why are you doing this?'' And they 
gave all of the obvious answers. And I said, ``What's the most important 
thing about it?'' And all four of them said, ``We want our children to 
look up to us. We want our children to be proud of us, and we want to 
feel good because we know we're supporting our kids.'' All four of them 
said that.
    And you know, more than 10 years ago--I've told this story many 
times, but I was at a Governor's meeting when we were talking about 
reforming the welfare system, and I brought a woman from Arkansas there, 
and I asked her what the best thing about being off welfare was. And she 
said, ``When my boy goes to school and they say, `What does your mama do 
for a living,' he can give an answer.'' He can give an answer.
    Now, I have kept in touch with that woman for 10 years, and she 
introduced me the day I signed the welfare reform bill. She has four 
children now, this lady who was trapped in welfare. One of them has a 
good job; one of them is studying to be a doctor; one is in a technical 
school; the other one is a high school honor student. I'd say welfare 
reform worked for her. And it will work for nearly everybody if the rest 
of us will just create enough opportunity for all of those people who 
are dying to have it.
    Now, I want to say, finally, we have got to take this law and make 
it live in the lives of our people. We can take poverty out of politics. 
We can give it back to the community. There will always be a time when 
the economy is better and the economy is worse. There will always be 
people who will hit a little rough patch in life and have trouble. But 
we do not need to have a nation with a huge number of people who are 
physically isolated from the rest of us living lives they can never 
break out of. We have all permitted that to happen; now it is time for 
all of us to stop that from happening and chart a bright new future to 
the 21st century.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 6:41 p.m. in the Langford Auditorium at the 
Vanderbilt University Medical Center. In his remarks, he referred to Joe 
Wyatt, chancellor, Vanderbilt University; Roscoe Robinson, vice 
chancellor for health affairs, Vanderbilt University Medical Center; 
Justin Dart, former Chair, President's Committee on

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Employment of People With Disabilities; Noah Liff, chairman, Steiner 
Liff Iron and Metal Co.; and Ned Ray McWherter, former Governor of 
Tennessee.